Games and narrative: Narrative vs. story

The perennial "narrative in games" conversation has been in pretty high gear on the internets of late. I'm less interested in why the topic is popping up again with such regularity, and more concerned with trying to find some clarity on the topic so that we can move past rehashing ye olde ludology vs. narratology debate when we talk about what games are. I intend to resurrect some of the threads of that conversation in order to reconcile them with my own stance on games and narrative, but before I do that there's a little backfilling to do. For that reason, I'm going to proceed through a few somewhat smaller posts on this topic (starting with this one) rather than dumping all of my thoughts on narrative and games in one massive wall of text.  

To get started I want to explain what I mean when I'm talking about narrative, and why the term itself is extremely slippery. For the most part, when people use the term narrative in talking about games they're referring to the story the game tells. Some folks use the term (at times derisively) to discuss narrative as the wrapper which provides players with a fiction to frame their play experience. Others discuss it in terms of the actual experience of play. These are just a few of the ways narrative gets used in discussing games, and there are of course reasons to use the term in all of these ways. However as you can see, this tends to make conversations about narrative in games a little muddy.

The truth is I've been known to mobilize the term narrative for many of these purposes, and will undoubtedly continue to do so in various contexts in the future as warranted. Generally though, I've tried and will continue to try to put appropriate modifiers in front of narrative (specifics in a later post), and here's the reason why. In the back of my mind when I use narrative, I'm usually thinking about the term as defined by poet and conceptual artist David Antin. Antin juxtaposes narrative against story stating that narrative is:

"...the representation of the confrontation of a desiring subject with the threat or promise -- or threat and promise -- of transformation." While story is "the representation of a sequence of events and parts of events that articulate a significant transformation."

In looking at these definitions, you can probably see why I find Antin's approach to narrative to be a natural fit in discussing games. First there's the fact that transformation sits at the heart of both definitions. This is a key part of all games as the system fundamentally changes states over the course of play. Additionally, there's the part about desiring subjects. Not only do players frame themselves as desiring subjects when relating their own played experiences ("player narratives"), but agents in games are also desiring subjects striving as they operate within a conflict space where transformation of some sort is the unavoidable outcome. Since the system will change states over the course of game play, whether the transformation is portrayed through changes to a player character or simply through changes to the game world, the threat or promise of transformation is a fundamentally useful characteristic for discussing games. That threat or promise of transformation provides the foundational tension around which the play experience is formed.

Perhaps most importantly, because Antin distinguishes story from narrative by defining story around a sequence of events, his approach provides us with a simple means for distingusing between games that present a structured linear progression (e.g games with a story), and those that don't. At the same time, this framework acknowledges the manner in which narrative is an element in even the most abstract gameplay. Both Tetris and Mass Effect can be discussed as narrative bearing artifacts. However Mass Effect has a story while Tetris doesn't. This doesn't stop players from developing stories about their experiences playing Tetris, but the sequences of events that constitute those stories result entirely from emergent sequences of play. In "big narrative" games including games with interactive narrative components like Mass Effect, stories are written into the game and hence the stories players tell about gameplay rearticulate the stories that are designed into the game.

TBC